So I uncorked a gaffe ... but why was it a gaffe?

I was giving a speech in Blackpool the other day when I almost swerved in mid-sentence. There was a particular phrase ahead, and I suddenly remembered that I had been begged not to use it.

It was an insulting phrase, I had been told, and it needlessly reinforced out-of-date stereotypes. And yet here I was in mid-flow, before an audience of about 300 university administrators, and frankly I could think of no other way of expressing what I meant, so I just blurted it out.

"And the problem is particularly acute," I announced - and I inwardly cringed as I prepared to uncork the gaffe - "in top universities. Is that OK?" I asked them desperately. "Is it OK if we talk about top universities?"

It was not OK. A murmur of protest went around the room. There were several shouts of "no". Thankfully Mike Baker of the BBC was on hand, a man well versed in the euphemisms that might please a conference of educationists. "You could try saying 'research-intensive' universities," he suggested, "or you could try saying 'selective' universities, as opposed to 'recruiting' universities."

I thanked the beaming BBC man, and around the room people's breathing recovered, and heartbeats returned to normal; and yet, as I chuntered on, I brooded on the nature of our sensitivity.

Why am I told to banish this kind of language? How can we possibly dispense with ideas of academic hierarchy when these concepts - first, second, third; good, better, best - are at the heart of higher education, and the whole £45bn university economy depends entirely on rank, prestige and reputation?

And how can you have rank and prestige unless you accept that there is differentiation, and differentiation must mean the use of concepts like "top". Mustn't it? Or are we really to believe that all Britain's universities are equally top in their own sweet and special way?

It would be nice to pretend that this is true; it is just that no one really believes it, least of all Gordon Brown. If there were no such thing as a "top" university, then it would not have mattered a damn that Laura Spence failed to get into Oxford. So why do we persist in this fiction of equality?

I suppose it is all about politeness, and our very reasonable desire not to be dismissive, by implication, of those universities that are not normally thought of as "top". But is that not completely defeatist?

The essence of reputation is that it can be won and lost, and there is no reason why a modern university - to pick a category at random - should not also be a top university.

Is there? I do worry about the pretence of equality in British education, because, in so many ways, it damages the very people it is meant to help and to protect.

We, in the ruling elite, pretend that there is no selection in our schools, and we defend our position in the name of social justice and equality. What balls. What liars and hypocrites we are. The ruling liberal elite opposes selection in schools, and yet ruthlessly uses its position to maximise its advantages.

We use fee-paying education, whether in the form of tutors (like Tony Blair) or by sending our children to fee-paying schools (like Polly Toynbee). We use our economic power to buy our way into the catchment area of good schools - and yet by our laws we forbid the bright poor from using academic selection, the one utensil that might allow them to compete with bourgeois buying power.

It is a conspiracy perpetrated in the name of equality. We pretend to be horrified at the very idea of academic differentiation, and we thereby entrench division. The same point could be made about the pretence that all subjects are somehow equally challenging, and that an A in design and technology is as hard-won as an A in physics.

The result of this disastrous illusion is that too many students in the maintained sector have been steered away from the "crunchy" subjects, and that these subjects become effectively ghettoised in the independent sector and the grammar schools, which helps these schools do so well in entrance to "top" universities.